Vorschau ansehen
The choice of US Attorney General is the most consequential personnel decision President Trump can make right now. Everything else — immigration, the economy, foreign wars, government waste, fraud, elections — depends on it. None of those problems can be solved while the people running the government’s law enforcement apparatus are the same class of lawyers who built and maintained the current system. That is the central question raised by President Trump’s announced intention to nominate Todd Blanche as the next Attorney General.
Conservative commentator Mike Davis penned an endorsement of Blanche. He went on Steve Bannon’s War Room to make the same point. But a close examination of Davis’ points shows that Blanche is a terrible choice for Attorney General and that President Trump needs to consider an alternative.
One of President Trump’s defining campaign promises — arguably the most important — was to drain the swamp. The premise of that promise is that the federal government has been captured by a class of people who serve themselves, their donors, and their institutional relationships rather than the country. As our country currently stands, if you oppose the government, the government can designate you a terrorist, strip you of your constitutional rights, charge you with a vague crime, throw you in jail, destroy your name in the media, and drag you through a legal process you cannot afford and have almost no chance of winning. The DOJ coerces plea deals. It brands people felons, sends them to prison, and takes their means of earning a living and their reputation. There are no meaningful safeguards to prevent any of that. If it hasn’t happened to you, it is only because you haven’t yet given them a reason. The attorney general sits at the top of that system. The choice of who fills that role is critical.
President Trump’s past Attorneys General
It is beyond dispute that President Trump has not chosen well in the area of Attorneys General. Jeff Sessions was a failure from the first day. Rod Rosenstein was the enemy within. Bill Barr did nothing and ultimately betrayed the president. Most recently, Pam Bondi did not even move from Florida to Washington. Her deputy, Todd Blanche, ran the DOJ during Bondi’s tenure. Every Bondi failure is Blanche’s failure.
Given that history, President Trump’s supporters – the people who supported him since he walked down the escalator – need to make their voices heard and help guide President Trump to make a good decision so we can get an AG who will actually drain the swamp.
500 days without draining the swamp
On the day Mike Davis published his endorsement of Blanche, Blanche’s team put out a post on X titled “500 days of winning.” It lists nine items his team considered their greatest accomplishments. None of them address draining the swamp. None of them address the ongoing weaponization of the justice system. None of them include mass firings of corrupt prosecutors, consequences for officials who abused their offices, or any investigation into the DOJ’s documented practice of coercing plea deals from defendants. That reflects the priorities of the DOJ under Todd Blanche, and tells us that if he is confirmed, we will get more of the same and the swamp will not be drained.
Blanche’s resume is disqualifying
In Mike Davis’ endorsement of Blanche, he points to his legal experience. It is worth examining. Davis frames Blanche’s early career as one of “public service and sacrifice.” The first items Davis points to are federal clerkships in the Southern District of New York. These jobs are not “public service.” Federal clerkships are appointments that law students intensely compete for because they allow young lawyers to form close relationships with sitting judges — relationships that can be professionally useful for the rest of a career. Law firms pay significant signing bonuses and grant deferments to associates who take them. They are a rare privilege, not a sacrifice. It’s not different than saying going to Harvard is “public service.”
More relevant than the nature of the clerkships is who the judges were. In New York, federal judicial appointments require sign-off from the home state senators under the blue-slip rule. New York’s senators have been Democrats for decades — Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton to name two. Blanche clerked first for a judge appointed by President Obama, then for a Trump-appointed judge who could only be appointed after being approved by Chuck Schumer. These judges are his mentors. They are products of the very system that the voters who elected President Trump repudiated. Those formative relationships do not disqualify Blanche on their own, but Davis presents them as a credential. They are, at best, a reason for caution.
Ten years as an Obama prosecutor at SDNY
After his clerkships, Blanche spent roughly a decade as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York — the entirety of which ran through the Obama years. He was an Obama DOJ prosecutor. To understand what that means, consider what happened during that time. The SDNY prosecuted Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza had given $20,000 to a friend running in a New York Republican primary, a doomed race. He could have given the same amount legally through a different vehicle. There was no victim. He was investigated and arrested, held on $50,000 bail — more than the value of the alleged crime — and eventually coerced into a plea deal. The prosecution tarnished his reputation permanently, cost him his Second Amendment rights, disrupted his life, and ran up enormous legal bills. It came, suspiciously, shortly after he released a film critical of Barack Obama. President Trump later pardoned him, explicitly acknowledging the prosecution as weaponization.
That happened while Blanche was at SDNY. And D’Souza is only the most prominent case. It is reasonable to assume there were others. During the Trump administration, left-leaning DOJ attorneys publicly resigned en masse rather than serve under a president they opposed. Blanche had no such objection to serving Obama’s DOJ. This should be disqualifying. It would be roughly analogous to President Biden appointing Rudy Giuliani as his attorney general. That would never happen. There is no reason that President Trump needs to appoint Obama prosecutors to the highest levels. There are alternatives.
Wilmer Hale
Davis says that after his time at SDNY, Blanche “became a partner at a prestigious New York law firm.” He conspicuously does not name the firm. It was WilmerHale.
WilmerHale is the same firm where Robert Mueller was a partner before he departed — taking a team of WilmerHale colleagues with him — to lead the special counsel investigation of President Trump. These were Todd Blanche’s colleagues, maybe even his friends. Being a partner at Wilmer Hale should be disqualifying.
The revolving door between federal prosecutor offices and white-collar defense firms is itself one of the central problems with the “justice system.” Defendants pay enormous fees to firms that advertise their roster of former prosecutors, hoping those relationships will produce better outcomes. This is the arrangement that needs reforming. Blanche is a product of it and incapable of reforming it. He has taken no steps of reforming it in the last 500 days when he had the chance.
It is also worth noting that President Trump issued an executive order regarding WilmerHale on March 27, 2025, just weeks after taking office. The order stated:
WilmerHale engages in obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends, supports efforts to discriminate on the basis of race, backs the obstruction of efforts to prevent illegal aliens from committing horrific crimes and trafficking deadly drugs within our borders, and furthers the degradation of the quality of American elections, including by supporting efforts designed to enable noncitizens to vote. Moreover, WilmerHale itself discriminates against its employees based on race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws, including through the use of race-based ‘targets.’ WilmerHale is also bent on employing lawyers who weaponize the prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process and distort justice. For example, WilmerHale rewarded Robert Mueller and his colleagues — Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s ‘top aide’ and ‘closest associate,’ and James Quarles — by welcoming them to the firm after they wielded the power of the Federal Government to lead one of the most partisan investigations in American history. Mueller’s investigation epitomizes the weaponization of government, yet WilmerHale claimed he ’embodies the highest value of our firm and profession.’ Mueller’s ‘investigation’ upended the lives of public servants in my Administration who were summoned before ‘prosecutors’ with the effect of interfering in their ability to fulfill the mandates of my first term agenda. This weaponization of the justice system must not be rewarded, let alone condoned.
That is President Trump’s own assessment of the firm where his nominee for attorney general spent years as a partner, “raking in millions.” Mike Davis somehow forgot to mention that small detail in his endorsement.
The defense of President Trump
Davis argues that Blanche sacrificed his career to defend President Trump. The facts do not support that framing. First of all, it’s not as if Blanche represented President Trump pro bono. He likely made millions representing President Trump. Moreover, Blanche did not sacrifice. He made a calculated decision that representing President Trump was an avenue to political advancement if Trump won the 2024 election. That gamble paid off. This can hardly be considered acting out of principle.
In fact, this character defect should be a disqualifier. What Mike Davis is telling us is that Blanche, a lifelong Democrat, was willing to switch teams when it served him personally. We’ve experienced that with so many, including Mike Pence, Bill Barr, and others.
There are so many qualified attorneys who were with President Trump through thick and thin for years, and truly sacrificed, including being the victims of weaponization themselves. Why would he choose someone who only profited from President Trump’s victimization, and has shown that he will jump ship the moment the weather begins to change?
Moreover, as Davis himself acknowledges, Trump avoided prison not because of Blanche’s legal skills. Blanche lost the New York case on every count. It was a complete shutout – Government 34, Trump zero. President Trump did not avoid jail because he had good lawyers. He avoided jail because of his loyal voters who rejected the legal system that Blanche is a product of and that Blanche has taken zero steps to reform in the last 500 days.
His failed tenure as Deputy and Acting AG
Speaking of which, let’s examine the problem of weaponization and how what Blanche has done about it in the last 500 days when he was in charge.
Lawfare is not exclusively a Democratic problem. It is a deep state problem that crosses party lines and is currently ongoing. As just one example, we are seeing it now applied to people who oppose data centers, who are being labeled terrorists by the same apparatus that labeled school board parents terrorists. The problem is institutional, not partisan. A nominee who frames weaponization as something Democrats do, rather than something the system does, is distracting from the problem and has no intention to fix the system. Blanche took no steps to investigate how this happened and ensure Americans that these tools of prosecution against political enemies won’t be abused.
Under Blanche’s tenure — first as the de facto head of DOJ under Bondi and then as acting AG — the DOJ continued the prosecution of Dr. Kirk Moore, a doctor who helped patients avoid the consequences of Biden-era mandates, for months into the Trump presidency. There have been no consequences for the prosecutors who continued that case. The Dr. Moore case happened to generate enough attention such that Pam Bondi, when she heard about it, immediately declared it weaponization and dropped the case immediately with the stroke of her pen and without any further investigation other than what she learned from posts on X. Think about that. How many thousands of other cases of weaponization are ongoing that they don’t even require investigation to determine that they are weaponization? But these cases are ongoing under Blanche and he has made no efforts to identify and end these ongoing injustices that are occurring in his name and under his watch. How can he sleep at night knowing that there may be thousands of lives that he can save with the stroke of a pen? This is not someone who should lead the DOJ during this critical time.
Moreover, there were no consequences for the prosecutors who continued these weaponized persecutions. If you abuse such awesome and devastating powers, there should be one strike and you’re out. But nobody was fired following the Dr. Moore dismissal. Blanche did not even order an investigation into the prosecutors to see if there are other weaponized cases. In fact, the DOJ just ignored the whole incident and moved on as if everything is fine. But it’s not fine. We need someone who understands the problem of weaponization and makes it the number one priority.
The Epstein fiasco that fractured the Trump base also happened under his watch. This should also be a disqualifier by itself. The base deserves someone who will look at the whole matter with a fresh set of eyes.
Under Blanche, the DOJ continues all of its weaponization tactics, including silencing criminal defendants from going to the public with their side of the story. Just a few days ago, his DOJ successfully petitioned a court to sanction a criminal defendant for going on television to allege that his prosecution was politically motivated. The DOJ’s practice of using press releases to publicly destroy defendants before trial has continued without reform.
No meaningful effort has been made to investigate how many Americans were wrongly coerced into plea deals. There have been no mass firings of prosecutors who weaponized the government during the Biden years. There are no bar complaints or other consequences. The narrative that DOJ is fine and that what happened under Biden was the work of a few bad apples is allowed to stand — because these are Blanche’s professional colleagues, and that is how people in this system protect the system.
I know this from direct experience. I served in DOJ and attempted to bring documented, ongoing cases of weaponization to Blanche’s attention for review. I was asked to resign. I spoke about this in my interview with Brandon Straka from #walkaway.
If anything should disqualify him it is his handling of the riots in Newark that are ongoing. Merrick Garland showed that if Trump supporters get out of line there will be no mercy. They hunted down J6 grammas up until January of 2025 and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Trump supporters are justifiably terrified to attend gatherings after J6. Yet look how antifa and these other groups riot and attack federal officers with impunity. They act as if they know with certainty that Blanche’s DOJ will not give them the J6 treatment.
Biden’s DOJ acted so harshly against its political enemies, that Trump supporters are afraid even to engage in lawful First Amendment protected activity. But Blanche fails to take any meaningful action, so antifa is not afraid to violate the law night after night.
When it mattered, Blanche was nowhere to be found
Mike Davis speaks of Blanche’s courage. But Blanche was nowhere to be found when real courage and sacrifice were needed.
I was a January 6 defense attorney. When those defendants needed help, I left stable employment and took their cases, mostly for free or for nominal fees. They were people who supported President Trump and whose constitutional rights were being trampled. What they went through was far worse than anything President Trump personally endured through his legal proceedings.
Where was Todd Blanche during that period? He “raking in millions” as a partner at fancy law firms. He was a high-profile federal criminal defense attorney. He had resources. He had a platform. He had connections. But he chose not to use any of it for the J6ers or other victims of weaponization who couldn’t pay his exorbitant fees. He was there for millionaires and billionaires, but had no time to help Americans. He only switched teams when he saw an opportunity to make money and bet on President Trump’s voters putting President Trump back in office.
Those small number of attorneys who fought weaponization during the Biden years did it with no money, no institutional support, no access, and no reinforcements. Todd Blanche was not one of the people who showed up. President Trump should seek out a candidate who actually sacrificed during the Biden years.
Conclusion: Blanche is not the AG we need
Todd Blanche’s career is the typical mediocre elite career path: clerkships, federal prosecutor, a partnership at a white-shoe law firm, and then a politically calculated pivot when circumstances created an opportunity.
The people who followed that path are the culprits who produced the system that Trump voters repudiated. The people who benefited from that system, and whose professional and personal relationships are embedded in that system, will not dismantle that system. They will manage it and protect it.
If Blanche is confirmed he will continue to run out the clock, constantly putting out some empty red meat and telling us that judgment is just around the corner. Any day now Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Anthony Fauci will be perped walked. Just keep watching TV. It’s happening any day. Trust the plan.
President Trump has a narrow window to put someone in the Attorney General’s office who will actually begin the work of dismantling the police state. Todd Blanche’s record as acting AG and as deputy AG shows that he is not that person. His background shows why.
I challenge Mike Davis to respond to any of the factual points raised here. His endorsement rests on credentials that, on examination, argue against Blanche’s nomination rather than for it.
The base that voted for President Trump deserves to have this nomination examined honestly before it is confirmed. This may be the last opportunity to get an attorney general who will take the first real steps toward dismantling the institutional apparatus that has been used against ordinary Americans for years.
The post Is Blanche the Right Choice? The Case Against Todd Blanche for Attorney General appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.